Blog
From the Editor's Desk (June-July 2012)Tony Addison I started writing this ‘From the Editor’s Desk’ in Accra, to the sound of an African drum band, preparing for a ceremony to mark the...
Tony Addison I started writing this ‘From the Editor’s Desk’ in Accra, to the sound of an African drum band, preparing for a ceremony to mark the...
24 September 2013 Roger Williamson Another big weekend for UNU-WIDER. The stage was well set on Thursday 19 September for a consideration of...
Based on a unique panel dataset consisting of both formal and informal firms surveyed every other year from 2005 to 2013, this paper explores the benefits of formalization to the government and firm employees in Vietnam. We find that formalization...
What types of businesses benefit or suffer due to geographic clustering? Data available from Cambodia on competition and spillovers—at both village- and commune-level—is useful to answer a number of questions about the effects of clustering and the...
Entrepreneurs are often adversely affected by violent conflict such as civil war. At the same time though entrepreneurs may contribute to or even benefit from violent conflict and other ‘destructive’ and ‘unproductive’ activities that limit economic...
Based on unique panel data consisting of both formal and informal firms, this paper uses a matched double difference approach to examine the relationship between legal status and firm level outcomes in micro, small and medium manufacturing...
The informal sector makes up an overwhelming share of both gross domestic product and total employment in Africa. In this paper, we lay out some of the basic characteristics of the informal sector in sub-Saharan Africa, relevant institutions, and...
This article uses panel data from a survey of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Vietnam to uncover which firms pay bribes and which do not. We also study how bribe paying evolved between 2005 and 2007 and test how the determinants of bribes...
This paper is the first to address the challenges of measuring the labour income share of developing countries. The poor availability and reliability of national accounts data, and the fact that self-employed people, whose labour income is hard to...
Tommaso Ciarli, Saeed Parto and Maria Savona Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world with an estimated per capita income of 300...
This paper investigates if changes in the minimum wage have influenced changes on the formality and informality rates, and the level of wages in Ecuador. A 12-year panel was built. It allows to overcome the short time span of household data and so to...
This paper analyses the consequences of formalisation on the performance of informal firms, using a panel dataset from Vietnam. We find that switching firms (before switching) have higher profit and value added compared to non-switching firms...
Myanmar’s transition to a market-based economy is accompanied by rapid development of the private manufacturing sector, which has large potential for improving economic growth. The overall success of the sector, however, should not be taken for...
Using unbalanced panel data from the small and medium enterprise surveys in Vietnam in 2005, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2015, this paper investigates factors associated with informality in Vietnam. We assume that household businesses, especially the...
Is the lack of ‘managerial capital’, alongside human and financial capital, a constraint on the growth of firms in developing countries? The evidence on this is still mixed, especially among small and medium enterprises. This paper uses a panel of...
Public policy aimed at building capacity among the extremely poor (support for food and nutrition; health; education and, more recently, financial services), combined with a stable macroeconomic environment, has proved to be successful for poverty...
Almost twenty years have passed since researchers from the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru showed how ‘bad laws’ impose disproportionate costs on those who choose formality. Although a multitude of conflicting regulations still precludes...
Given the current focus of international development policy on pro-poor growth and poverty reduction, the role of the informal sector in the process of economic development is again at the top of the research and policy agenda. A key question is if...
This paper addresses informal cross-border trade in the Horn of Africa, with an emphasis on the Somalia borderlands. It will be shown that despite the collapse of a government in 1991, Somalia’s unofficial exports of cattle to Kenya have grown...
The objective of the paper is to understand the transforming relationship between the formal and informal sector in a liberalizing open developing economy. There are various facets in this relationship, and we focus on three essential aspects. First...
The following essay has three parts. The first is a story about fluctuations in the balance of the relationship between impersonal and personal principles of social organization. This draws heavily on Max Weber’s interpretation of western history...
This paper explores the relationship of the informal economy to the formal economy and to the formal regulatory environment. It begins with a comparison of the earlier concept of the ‘informal sector’ with the new expanded concept of the ‘informal...
Findings of cross-cultural psychology suggest that different approaches to rule enforcement have cultural roots. Individualist societies have established a rule of law, in which rules prevail; collectivist societies have a rule of man, which allows...
This study attempts to determine the extent to which human potential may be unlocked by government or other formal sector actions that induce voluntary contributions by individuals to the activities of Indonesia’s posyandus or village health posts...
One of the most notable phenomena during economic transition is the shrinkage of the public sector and expansion of the not working population, simultaneously with the expansion of both the formal and informal private sectors. We address the related...
Studies of land property rights usually focus on tenure security and transfer rights. Rights to determine how to use the land are regularly ignored. However, user rights are often limited. Relying on a unique Vietnamese panel data set at both...
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Part of Book Industries without Smokestacks
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This article studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in Delhi, India. First, the study finds that men’s employment...
This paper provides a comparative summary of recent national statistics from five Latin American countries on employment losses and gains during the peak COVID-19 years compared with pre-pandemic levels. As part of its work on the impact of the...
Effective domestic revenue mobilization has gained renewed urgency, especially in the light of the need to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. In taxation debates, the ‘informal sectors’ have hitherto been assumed to be a part of the problem and...
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. This study explores this kind of reverse transition, that is, when the...
Part of Journal Special Issue Women’s Work
Expansion of social protection reach among workers in the large informal economy represents a persisting and thorny challenge in the development context. In Mainland Tanzania, several domestically led policy reforms have been introduced to...
Part of Book The Job Ladder
Part of Journal Special Issue What sustains informality
Part of Journal Special Issue What sustains informality
The COVID-19 pandemic has escalated processes of labour transition from industrial work to the informal economy, which have always characterized the life of the working poor. Exploring urban-to-rural labour transitions through a feminist political...
We examine the patterns and correlates of the productivity gap between male-owned and female-owned firms for informal enterprises in India. Female-owned firms are on average 45 per cent less productive than male-owned firms, with the clearest...
In spite of having some intensive national strategies to address poverty, Tanzania lacks a coherent national strategy to ensure sustainable livelihoods for those working in its informal economy, of which street vending is an important sector. Based...
This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in India. First, we find that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points post-pandemic relative...
We consider two vertical links between informal- and formal-sector firms and study their implications. In one case, the final products produced by the formal- and informal-sector firms are vertically differentiated in terms of quality, and the size...
While there is general agreement that regulatory avoidance is an important part of firms’ decisions to produce in the informal sector, there is much less agreement on how regulation and enforcement affect firms’ decisions on, inter alia, which sector...
Despite the severe negative economic shock associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, evidence from many contexts points to a surge in sales on online platforms, as well as shifts in the composition of demand. This paper investigates how the pandemic has...
The lingering policy dilemma facing many governments in sub-Saharan Africa in recent years is what can be done in the short to medium term to boost the output and incomes of individuals and enterprises in the informal sector, given the size and...
This paper assesses the participation of female traders, safety factors, and existing policies and legislation in the informal sector in Tanzania. Primary data were obtained from 11 in-depth interviews, 10 focused group discussions, and 236...
In this paper, we investigate the working conditions of the young women working as assistants in the food vending sector in Tanzania using interviews and focus group discussions which are supplemented with quantitative survey. Data were collected in...
Despite a sizeable literature on the labour market effects of maternity leave regulations on women in developed countries, how these policies affect women’s work in developing countries with a large informal sector remains poorly understood. This...
At the UNU-WIDER Inequality conference September 2014 we interviewed Murray Leibbrandt, Professor of Economics at the University of Cape Town on...
This article is part of UNU’s “17 Days, 17 Goals” series, featuring research and commentary in support of the United Nations Sustainable Development...
UNU-WIDER had a busy September. We celebrated our 30th birthday with some 600 people at our three-day conference on ‘Mapping the Future of Development...
Part of Journal Special Issue Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States
Bangladesh and Pakistan had very divergent experiences with aid after 1971. Politics in Pakistan was less inclusive in terms of opportunities for intermediate class political entrepreneurs. In this context, the significant role of military aid to...
With the aim of reducing women’s greater unpaid care work than men’s and increasing women’s paid employment, this paper examines the extent to which World Bank investments address unpaid care work. The paper conducts an in-depth gender analysis of 36...
This paper examines how decentralization and informalization are reshaping urban governance in contemporary Africa. By exploring the interface between urban institutional failures and popular organizational solutions, the paper considers how informal...